Another apple orchard bites the dust

[crown]

It's a sad state of affairs the apple orchards and hay fields are growing more and more scarice. As I ride around my home I constantly see survey stobs and real estate signs advertising new 5 acre lots, I can't blame the land owners with 5 acres selling for anywhere between $65,000 and $110,000 each the payoff is great. I just wish I would see more land being used to grow apples, corn, beans, or hay rather than houses/w3tcompact/icons/sad.gif

 

[BB_TX]

I know what you mean. I live over 30 miles north of Dallas and work in a northern suburb, a 31 mile drive each way. As little as 15 years ago I had a nice drive thru the country going to and from work. Now it is 31 miles of houses and strip shopping centers, and an occasional large mall. Bumper to bumper traffic all the way. I could never have imagined they could have built that much in that amount of time./w3tcompact/icons/frown.gif
Hopefully I only have to do this about 5 more years. Then I will move out another 30 miles and hope it don't catch up to me before I pass./w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif

 

[Mrwurm]

Same thing in Michigan, Jeff. Most of the orchards have been sold or are for sale. I started noticing about four years ago that the farmers would let the apples rot on the trees. Whole orchards went unpicked. I was told that it's cheaper for the farmers to buy import apples from China and sell them at their fruit stands. Last couple years they have been planting corn on the property next to me, but they don't harvest it. It rots until spring and then they disk it under. Go figure.

 

[rozett]

Besides the value of the land, many of the orchards are going out because they can not compete with the foreign (especially Chinese) apple growers. When I was a kid, I worked on a fruit farm for 9 years. All of the neighborhood kids worked there. Now you can't get a local to work on a farm (at least in the east). The farmers need to bring in their workers from Puerto Rico and the Dominican. They now have all of the environmental, immigration, OSHA, and labor laws to worry about. I'm not saying that those are bad things, but they definitely contribute with our inability to compete. Countries with much lower standard of living are not very interested in listening to our politicians talk about child labor and worker abuse, when they can double or triple their (meager) annual incomes.

Bill, I know exactly what you mean about North Texas... I used to Live in The Colony, Tx. when it was only 3-4,000 people (1978). I recently visited there when I was on a business trip to Dallas. I was flabbergasted with almost 40,000 people and all the malls. I'm glad I moved away before that happened.

 

[Bird]

And I lived in Plano when it was a farm community of 3-4,000 people and The Colony didn't even exist./w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif

 

[rozett]

OK Bird, .... but prehistoric times don't count. /w3tcompact/icons/grin.gif /w3tcompact/icons/laugh.gif